Natural Muscle November 2016 Celebrating 21 Years This Month! | Page 12

PROPER FORM

TRAINING

RE- EX AMINED

Personalize your
form for less
injuries and
bigger muscles

By Steve Marteski

W

e build muscle by pushing it to its limit and beyond.
This is what gives it a reason to grow and improve.
We do this by adding more weight, doing more reps, more
sets, and progressively increasing our overall work load, The
adverse side of this is it puts more stress on muscles, joints
and tendons. Thus you walk a fine line between positively
stressing the muscle for growth and injuring the muscle and
its components. Push it just a bit too far and muscles pull and
tear and joints and tendons get damaged. In fact, you take a
huge step backwards and often can’t train at all, pushing you
back to your starting point, or worse. This can become very
frustrating and discouraging. To have longevity in your training,
you must find a way to train hard, while minimizing injuries.
Finding ways to maximize stress to the muscle while minimizing risk is the way to long term success in building muscle.
HERE ARE SOME GUIDELINES TO KEEP YOU INJ URY FREE AND PROGRESSING IN YOUR TRAINING:
Not every exercise and machine is for you Stick to exercises that feel natural to your muscles. Just because
your workout partner loves behind-the-head presses, that does not
necessarily mean they are good for you. Everyone is put together a
little different and what may be a great exercise for one person may
be an injury trap for someone else. It has to do with the particular
frame of your body and what angles are ideal for your body from a
mechanical standpoint. Each bone structure and muscular structure is
slightly different, and a very slight adjustment in angle of a movement
can have a tremendous impact on how that muscle is worki ng. We
should work with our natural mechanics to properly work the muscle

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Natural Muscle Magazine

instead of forcing them into a potentially dangerous range of motion
that contradicts our mechanical flow. Look at this like a drawer in
your kitchen cabinet. It can only open one way. If you pull the door
straight out, it opens smoothly and easily, but if you try to pull it even
1 degree to the right, left, up or down, it rubs, scratches and comes off
the track. Joints largely function in the exact same way. If an exercise
feels awkward or doesn’t feel like you are fully getting the most out of
the target muscle, the chances are that movement conflicts with your
mechanics. While the shoulders and hips are ball joints with some
flexibility, elbows and knees are simple hinges with only one path of
motion. Focus on exercises that feel natural and you excel at. Find
what agrees with your body structure. It’s ok to be weak on some
exercises if you stay healthy in exchange. You can easily compensate
for this by performing similar exercises that are more suited for you.

resembled a straight line. The reason for this is that your brain had to
learn how to do the movement first…much like playing a guitar...we
can all look at musical notes and know exactly how to play a song on
a guitar.The hard part is manipulating your fingers to make the proper
chord strokes. Your muscles and brain had to learn the motion first and
form that mind-muscle connection. Many injuries happen as a result
of your muscles/joints not being accustomed to certain exercises and
weights. This can be reduced by practicing the movement multiple
times with lighter weight. This will essentially teach your muscles and
brain to perform the motion and be ready for heavier weight. Also,
when your nervous system becomes accustomed to an exercise, you
will be able to lift substantially more weight, not necessarily because
you grew more muscle, but because you are able to use the muscle
you do have more effectively.

Strict form isn’t always good form – Similar to
the above, keeping very strict form can be great to isolate specific
muscles and parts of muscles. However, keeping very strict form
also often restricts your muscle path and takes it out of its natural
motion. For instance, bench-pressing on the Smythe Press is often
more dangerous than bar bell or dumb bell bench press as you lose
the ability for your natural motion to make slight adjustments of a
couple millimeters from the top to bottom of the press. By restricting
this movement, your shoulders can be put in an unnatural position
and be more susceptible to damage.

Stretching pre-workout is not ideal - Stretching is
important to loosen muscles up and also helps push blood into them,
however, intense stretching is counter-productive to injury prevention.
Muscles that are overly loose are more vulnerable to injury as they
have less ability to maintain an ideal direction of motion. There is a
big distinction between stretching to prepare the muscle for work and
increase blood flow and stretching to elongate and fatigue the muscle.
Light stretching and warmups before workouts are ideal with the serious stretching after you train or toward the end of your workout when
the muscles are engorged with blood to further expand the muscles.

Warm up with repetition of the exercise you
are going to perform - Remember the first time you ever
tried depressing a set of dumb bells? You felt like a fish out of water
as you struggle to get both arms to go up and down in any way that

Overall, it is not difficult to go into the gym one day and have a
brutal workout….but you may get injured. The key to long term
success is having fantastic workouts day in, day out over the
course of years. There needs to be a strategic approach to this in
eliminating negative consequences of lifting.

November 2016

Celebrating 21 Years!